Anthropic expected to receive high ‘junk’ rating from credit agencies following IPO, FT report says

According to the Financial Times, Blackstone, the anchor investor in a recent $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic's chips, told investors it expects the Claude maker to get a high junk rating, in the double-B range, after its IPO. That's a reversal: Blackstone had previously said Anthropic would receive an investment-grade rating before 2027.

It's a prediction, not a rating, and both Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment to TechCrunch. But it lands days after Anthropic filed to go public, and it speaks directly to the question hanging over that filing: how a company spending this heavily on compute will keep paying for it.

We'd keep this in proportion. Double-B is the top of speculative grade, not a distress signal, and plenty of large, durable companies have lived there. Anthropic's own S-1, as discussed widely this week, shows a real business with fast-growing revenue. Nobody serious is saying the lights are about to go off.

What the forecast does tell us is how lenders see the shape of the risk. Anthropic has been on a compute spending spree over the past year, and that has worried investors. Rating agencies don't grade the excitement around a product; they grade whether cash flows can cover obligations through a bad stretch. A high-junk view says the debt side of the AI boom is still being underwritten on hope more than on proven, durable margins.

The practical consequence is cost. A junk rating makes borrowing harder and more expensive, and that pushes Anthropic toward the arrangement we're already seeing across the industry: stronger partners backing its debt and its data centers. The same day, reporting surfaced that Nvidia is weighing guaranteeing financing for an Nscale campus built for Anthropic. Put those together and the picture is a frontier lab whose growth is increasingly supported by other companies' balance sheets.

That's worth naming plainly because the risk doesn't stay with Anthropic. If the bet pays off, the guarantors and lenders look prescient. If AI demand cools, the obligations ripple outward to chipmakers, data center builders, and their creditors. We think useful AI is worth building at scale, and Anthropic has done more than most to show enterprises will pay for it. But public-market investors deserve to see the financing chain as clearly as they see the revenue line, and the about-face from Blackstone suggests the chain got shakier between one pitch and the next.

I'm also watching the gap between prediction and reality here. If agencies come in higher than Blackstone now expects, this forecast will look like caution. If they come in where it says, it becomes the baseline for every AI financing that follows.

Anthropic officially filed to go public earlier this week, sparking speculation about how its IPO will affect the wider AI industry. Investment-grade ratings indicate low risk for lenders; the double-B range sits just below that line.